From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jun 03 2003 - 12:03:49 MDT
Robin Hanson wrote:
> On 6/3/2003, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
>
>> ... Personally I look on all of this with suspicion. There are
>> millions of times more grains of sand than humans. Should I conclude
>> that I started out with an enormous prior probability of being a grain
>> of sand? There is nothing a cognitive pointer state *could have
>> been*; it just *is*. A mind is just something that the physical
>> universe coughs up from time to time, and all you can do is try and
>> calculate the correlation of that pointer state with environmental
>> variables. You can go forward from the discovery of new evidence; I'm
>> not sure it makes sense to selectively eliminate evidence you were
>> born with and ask what your "priors" were before that. I didn't start
>> out with a one-in-six-billion chance of being Eliezer Yudkowsky. I'm
>> just Eliezer Yudkowsky, where an Eliezer Yudkowsky is something the
>> universe coughs up from time to time. My prior probability of being
>> Eliezer is 1.
>
> I find it instructive to consider what my beliefs would be a wide range
> of counterfactual situations. On the other hand, many people are
> reluctant to consider various forms of counterfactuals, and offer
> various reasons for this reluctance. The reason that you offer here,
> however, that you knew all this when you were born, seems implausible.
> Perhaps you were born a much smarter baby that the rest of us, but most
> babies have no idea what their name is, how many humans have lived
> before them, how it is that a universe coughs up a mind, or even that
> they are in fact a mind that a universe coughed up.
I was born with the evidence. I hadn't yet processed that evidence, but
at birth, I was human. There was never a point at which I started doing
anthropic calculations knowing I was a sentient being, but not that I was
human.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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